-Would you wish us to invest it for you? -No, I would like you to set up a trust for dumb animals. -What kind of dumb animals do you have in mind, Mi… - Romain Gary

L'ironia è una dichiarazione di dignità. È l'affermazione della superiorità dell'essere umano su quello che gli capita.

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more.

I guess I’m only talking about my childhood. Things that become part of you when you’re a child and then you grow up and somehow they don’t — and that’s how you never get to be a mature person, an adult, with those naïve beliefs in you that never grew up . . .